Why PPC is Like Paul McCartney

Your marketing strategy as successful as Paul McCartney’s career

There are many companies out there who either have SEM managed by a dedicated SEM agency, or they have an agency that does all of their advertising including PPC in a separate team. If the company is managing their marketing in-house, often times PPC is still outsourced. This can lead to 2 issues in particular, because separating these areas of marketing can hinder the flow of information between them.

1 – What is PPC involved in? Search. There are only two reasons a person searches: because of their own self-generated need, or because they are being influenced to make that search (if it’s not through word of mouth, the most common other method is through marketing or advertising). If someone is managing PPC and another marketing effort (direct mail etc.) has triggered a lot of searches particularly on the brand, if they don’t know that has occurred they don’t know why people are searching. If something is happening that could affect search, the PPC manager can’t plan for it. By way of budgeting and, potentially, messaging. PPC Budgets are a hard spend ceiling so it is important to be able to have enough budget ready should a peak in spend happen. If you hit a budget ceiling, which causes ads to stop running, potential customers may end up clicking on competitor ads instead. Additionally, PPC can be used as a way of tracking the performance of offline advertising. If you guide people to perform a certain search, you can have an online ad ready that is related to the offline one – not just regarding ad copy but also the landing page(s).

2 – If your marketing channels are isolated, this can also lead to a broken conversion path. Sometimes, mainly for big ticket decisions, people can make over a dozen visits to a website before they convert. All it takes is one contradictory advertisement or weak customer experience between channels to break a conversion path, causing them to take their business elsewhere.

Why is PPC so important?

PPC is the main beneficiary from other marketing sources offline and online because one way or another, in some stage of the research and buying process search is very often involved. From a logistical point of view, it’s important to know how to assign money to PPC and other channels in order to avoid the budget issues described above. From a sales perspective, it’s important to embed PPC into your whole strategy.

In addition to complimenting offline campaigns, PPC is a good way of selling apps. This is because you can have app extensions within ads that link to the app store. If you have an app and you want to sell it or if it is the centre of your business, use PPC to promote it even if your main source of income is from within the app. This will undoubtedly become a more usual part of the app maker’s landscape with Apple introducing a sponsored result spot on their App Store search results.

For offline sales, having buy-in from both the higher ups in the business and the offline areas is important for being able to cross-reference offline sales with online ads. Local inventory ads are the most direct way PPC can influence sales within physical stores, allowing viewers to find the product they are looking for before they make the trip there.

How do you monitor all this properly?

The best way is to utilise multi-channel tracking – such as ESV Analytics – which can absorb marketing spend numbers, attribute sales beyond the last click and factor in offline sales and revenue.
If you’re set on having a marketing strategy as successful as Paul McCartney’s career, tweet at us @ESV_Digital_UK or follow us on LinkedIn for guidance.